Page 9 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

Eirik's body goes still.

The change is immediate and total. One moment he's occupying every corner of the room with his presence. The next he's motionless in a way that has nothing to do with injury and everything to do with what he is.

His breathing drops to the shallow, measured rhythm of a wolf conserving sound while processing a threat. His jaw tightens, and his eyes go to the door with a flatness that strips away every trace of charm and leaves behind the clean, focused machinery of a predator assessing distance and direction and intent.

Threat assessment. I'm learning his postures alongside his wound patterns, and this one is unmistakable.

"That's not the wind," I say.

He doesn't look away from the door. "My uncle won't stop looking. Finding my trail will give him a direction. The scouts I outran were close enough to scent me before the storm buried the track."

"The blizzard will keep them grounded. The passes are impassable, and the snow coverage will bury any trail you left."

When he turns his head toward me, the flatness in his gaze hasn't softened. "The blizzard ends."

He delivers it with the clean finality of a diagnosis: a fact that doesn't bend to preference. The blizzard is temporary, and when it ends, whatever followed him through the mountains will still be on the other side.

"How far is the fortress from here?"

The question comes without transition. One moment he's delivering a warning. The next he's running logistics, and the change tells me more about what he is than any amount of warmth or charm. An heir in exile doesn't stop being an heir because he's bleeding.

"A few hours down the mountain," I say.

"How many wolves does Stellan keep at the fortress through winter?"

"That isn't information I share with wounded strangers."

"It will be if my uncle's scouts find this cottage before the storm lifts." He says it without heat or pressure, the cold arithmetic of a man who has been calculating odds since he crossed the council hall over his father's body. "If they come, I need to know whether to fight or move. I can't do either without the information."

I hold his gaze. Then I begin stirring the broth, because stirring gives my hands something to do that isn't cataloging the way he looks when the charm drops and the animal underneath takes its place.

The firelight catches the pages on my worktable, and he follows the motion. His eyes move from the door to the table and stop on the open spread of my grandmother's birth registry. The pages are old, the ink faded to a soft brown. The margin notes are written in a hand I know better than my own.

Between the pages, held flat by the book's spine, a pressed flower sits in the crease of the binding. Petals thin as parchment, a pale color that I've never been able to match to any specimen in my reference materials.

My grandmother noted the plant alongside a dosage variation she'd been experimenting with. She described the soil it grew in, the altitude, the direction of the slope. She described everything except where to find it, and I've never been able to identify the specimen from her notes alone.

"That flower," Eirik says.

I go very still.

"The pressed one, between those pages." His voice has changed again. Not the warmth, not the threat assessment, but recognition. The quality of a man looking at a familiar thing in an unexpected place. "I know that plant. It grows above the snowline in Drakfell territory."

My hands, which have been steady through sutures and wound irrigation and the private act of doubling my suppressant, pause on the handle of the wooden spoon.

He knows the plant. He knows where it grows. The gap in my grandmother's records, the one I've never been able to close because the plant came from a territory I've never visited, is sitting on my table wrapped in bandages.

The question he hasn't asked is there in his face, open and direct: why does a Northern Pack healer have a Drakfell mountain flower pressed between pages that are older than both of us?

It's too sharp for someone who was unconscious and bleeding last night, and it tells me everything I need to know about how dangerous he'll be when he's healthy.

I remove the broth from the fire and pour it into a clay cup. I carry the cup to him and set it in front of his hands. "Drink this. The protein will support your healing factor, and the root vegetables will replenish the mineral deficit from the blood loss."

He takes the cup. His fingers close around mine for a fraction of a second before I pull free, and the contact is brief enough to be accidental and deliberate enough to register as a statement.

Alpha-proximity response: elevated skin conductivity, accelerated pulse at the wrist, warmth spreading from the point of contact along the median nerve. Standard physiological cascade. I categorize it, dismiss it, and move on.

"Signe," he says. My name in his mouth sounds like the first word of a question he's going to spend a long time finishing. "That flower. Those pages. Why does a wolf who seems very much at home, alone, in a secluded cottage above the tree line have a dead plant from my territory pressed into a book that looks like it hasn't left this table in years?"